Medical pumps are an important part of providing care to a patient. They are used for a variety of different therapies such as pain relief, nutrition, chemotherapy, and insulin. Each one of these therapies typically requires a different program for controlling operation of the pump. Additionally, each program typically requires different operating parameters for each patient depending on a variety of factors such as the substance prescribed for delivery, the prescribed dosage, and physical attributes of the patient.
Additionally, medical clinics, hospitals, or other facilities need to manage all of their medical pumps. Managing the pumps requires updating programs, loading the appropriate program into the pump depending on the prescribed therapy, loading and tracking operating parameters into the pump, and tracking performance of the pump.
All of these issues present a tremendous amount of information related to the patient and the pump that needs to be tracked, managed, and coordinated. Examples of such information includes patient records, standing orders, prescriptions, and the like. These issues also present a great deal of functionality that must be executed, managed, and coordinated. Examples include programming pumps, tracking pump inventory, downloading pump software and upgrades, monitoring and relaying alarm conditions, and tracking pump history logs.
Additionally, when an institution has a variety of different networked devices through which a caregiver would like to communicate with the pumps, each one needs to be individually programmed to communicate with the pumps. This programming drives up the cost and time required to network programmable devices and pumps. The cost and required time is even greater when the institution has a variety of different pumps and medical devices because the networked devices would require separate programming to communicate with each different make and model of medical pump or other medical device.